What Would Tarkovsky Do? & Other Lessons From Paul Schrader & 'First Reformed' [Interview] - Page 2 of 2

I’ve heard that you’ve taken the film to seminaries, can you describe the reactions there?
I did three cities for two days, the first day I’d show the film, Q&A, the next day I’d give a lecture from the new book and I’d do a panel with the faculty. So I did this at Calvin College, at Fuller Theological in Pasadena, and at New Haven. My first thought why I would do this went back to “The Last Temptation of Christ” and how we got blindsided and how the opponents of the film got the first blow in and then we never really recovered. And so I thought in this climate now, who knows who takes offense at what, and who knows who might rail against this film? And I don’t want them to have the first shot, so I’m going to take it out to the humanist, mainstream Christian community, because I had gotten a good review in “Christianity Today,” and I thought it would play in those communities, even though it’s not a faith-based film. Then even if they do come after me, I at least would have a reservoir of reputable religious scholars who will stand up for me. I still hope it doesn’t happen, and now I’m starting to think maybe it won’t, although one website, they gave a write-up and they had misinterpreted the trailer and thought the environmentalist was a bad guy and the minister was the good guy (Laughs).

What was the impetus for this film? Was it to write about religion, or to write about climate change, or more a response to your ideas on transcendent cinema?
It was the idea that it’s time now. You cross that Rubicon of saying it’s time now, and you go back and watch all the movies of this ilk that mean something to you, picking up pieces here and there. A character from “Diary of a Country Priest,” setting from “Winter Light,” ending from “Ordet,” levitation from Tarkovsky, opening shot from “Silent Light,” a little bit of “Wise Blood,” you’re just collecting these elements. What I didn’t understand, I thought I would put all these elements together and they would work. What I didn’t notice until later, what I didn’t notice was working, was “Taxi Driver.” The glue, the obsessive glue of “Taxi Driver,” was holding all these elements together. My editor said to me, ‘There’s a lot of ‘Taxi Driver’ in this film.’ And I said ‘I know there’s some, I put it in there.’ And he said ‘No, there’s a lot.’ And he was right, there is a lot. And it’s that obsessiveness, that throbbing urgency, that keeps it from feeling so cold.

Where do you stand on the central question of the film? Do you agree with Michael?
I don’t think there’s much cause for optimism. I think we as a species have made our decision, I don’t see how this decision can be reversed. Everyone’s hoping for a deus ex machina, a magic bullet, but I don’t see that coming.

The vision of the film is you must choose to hope. Because you can’t live the other way. Like Camus said, ‘I don’t believe, I choose to believe.’ The meditation says you must choose to hope, hold that in your mind, otherwise, it’s all despair. But of course, he’s not hoping. So you can hope, but I see very little evidence how this would work except through some magic bullet.

But on the other hand, we’re on the cusp of an evolutionary change anyway, and maybe the species of the future, the species of the singularity, non-carbon based life forms, they will hopefully adapt to the world. But for our species, getting out of the century is, I think, quite unlikely.

Was Ethan your first choice? He seems perfectly cast.
Yes, he was. There is a certain physiological type, for a priest who’s struggling, whether that’s Montgomery Clift in “I Confess,” or Claude Laydu in “Diary of a Country Priest,” so I was thinking of types like that, Jake Gyllenhaal or Oscar Issac, but Ethan had ten years on them and I thought that was an interesting ten years, he’s getting some interesting lines in his face now. The first time we met, I said ‘This is a lean back performance. Whenever you detect the other person is interested in you, move a little further away.’

Thinking about Jeffers versus Toller, do you think Toller’s self-critical brand of faith is lacking in today’s world?
There’s a whole type of Christianity now that is entertainment based, rather than soul-searching. And I have a problem with that because I think the question of divine being, or God, is a very private and quiet thing. To come into the presence of the holy is something you do yourself, you don’t do it in a football stadium. So when I see these evangelical rallies, it seems to me like everyone wearing red and doing the chop at a football stadium, or everyone at a Trump rally, or everybody at a Taylor Swift concert. It seems to me to be about the pleasure one gets from being in a group and all doing and saying the same things, and that to me is not what holiness is.

[Here we had some back and forth on liberal Christians being so overshadowed in the national conversation by conservative Evangelicals.]
When I’ve been going around to these conservative but mainstream seminaries, all these people, ministers, professors, just felt they had walked into a wall and were saying ‘what happened?’ The alt-right and the evangelicals have the loudest voices and they do such outrageous things, call so much attention to themselves, that people actually start to think that they represent Christianity, that it’s OK to give Trump a mulligan, which is just stunning. It’s very clear that Trump has driven a slice of the Christian church off a cliff. But actually I was quite heartened to visit these seminaries, which is of course where I came from, they are much more liberal now, in terms of homosexuality, in terms of creationism.

I found it interesting that the most fervent ‘believer’ in the film may have been Michael, who wasn’t really a Christian. Was that intentional?
Well, he’s the most committed. But that’s not entirely healthy either. You don’t have an explosive vest in your garage if you’re a healthy person. But what is interesting is the degree to which Toller is an environmentalist, or the degree to which he just caught the virus.

From Saint Augustine on, suicide is a sin, it’s selfish, you can’t repent, unless you’re Samson, and then you can pull the temple down right on top of you. Maybe what happens to Toller is he sees this greater mantle that he can wrap around himself that justifies his self-loathing, and he’s no longer just a guy drinking himself to death, he’s now spearheading a greater good. That may be his mental pathology and that may have as much to do with his environmentalism as anything else.